Product Description

At the age of four Marya looked in a mirror and decided she was fat. At 12 she was anorexic and by the time she was 18, she'd been hospitalized five times. But Marya decided to live. Here is her tale, told in a mix of memoir, cultural criticism and psychological examination.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #538482 in Books
• Published on: 1998-03-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Review
A gruesome, eloquent and brutally frank memoir of long-term bulimia and anorexia, and a clear-headed look at its many possible causes. Locked into an increasingly severe eating-disordered lifestyle from the age of nine, the author's life has been dominated by her relentless obsession with feeding, the size of her backside and counting her bones. There are no happy endings. Viewing things from her early twenties, married and a writer, treated but not cured, she is still haunted by her suicidal sickness and its legacy of collapsed veins, arrhythmic heartbeat and drastically reduced life expectancy - but, after countless hospitalizations and finally having starved herself to within a week of death, she is very lucky to be alive. Until recently no-one talked or wrote about eating disorders; now they are out in the open and part of the cultural mainstream. But whether or not they are taken seriously or even widely understood is questionable. This savage and uncompromising book is a reminder that however pointless and narcissistic they might appear from the outside, eating disorders are extremely complex and destructive, and, alarmingly, by no means unusual. (Kirkus UK)

Bulimic since she was 9 years old, anorexic since she was about 15, the author reveals how and why women with these eating disorders can be helped and, most of all, how long it takes for that help to take hold. Hombacher, a freelance editor and writer, is now 23 years old and, if not well ("it's never over, not really"), at least ingesting and keeping down enough food to sustain life and begin the repairs of the heart and other organs that were ravaged by over a decade of vomiting and starvation. Not yet convinced that she will survive, she struggles each morning over her bowl of "goddamn Cheerios" to let go of the urge to be thinner and of "the bitch in your head" who says, "You're fat." With the help of journals and thousands of pages of her own medical records, Hombacher explores why she began trying to make herself disappear. Although in many ways she fit the profile of a person with an eating disorder - her family life was emotionally chaotic, she was a perfectionist - Hombacher feels there is more to it, including society's dictate that "you can't be too rich or too thin." In and out of eating-disorder clinics and mental institutions for many years, she also encountered general practitioners who accepted her extremely low weight - she bottomed out at 52 pounds - as normal. Descriptions of both the desperate need to binge and purge and the grip of the addiction to not-eating are vivid. Along the way, Hombacher was involved with drugs and promiscuous sex but managed to keep her habits and her lifestyle a secret. Hombacher's message is a warning about the complexity of eating disorders - that they are not simply about food or parental missteps or even "thin is in," but about a tapestry of dysfunction that gives rejection of nourishment a terrible potency of its own. (Kirkus Reviews)

From the Publisher
excerpts from the British reviews
‘A heart-rending memoir’ Elle

‘A stunningly original and beautifully written book gouging deep into a gruesome subject which, by comparison, other writers have merely flirted with.’ KATIE CAMPBELL, Evening Standard

‘This factual account of a 23-year old’s experience of anorexia and bulimia is not just another confessional. It has not been written as an act of therapy or for financial gain. It is a prose poem. This does not detract from its painful force nor from the author’s searing intelligence (one has to keep reminding oneself that she is only 23) but rather adds to the force of her communication…Through a mixture of horrific autobiography, medical anecdotes and quotes from Nietzsche, Plath, Emily Dickinson and Lewis Carroll, she tries to tell you what suffering from anorexia is like. At every stage in the story of her illness she pulls to pieces the thought processes that justify starving herself to death. Like Plath she writes with a metaphoric intensity which at times seems tragically indistinguishable from the power of her drive to self-destruct. Her brutal honesty as to why it happened to her – family culture, low self-worth, did she just come out that way? – and her lack of special pleading, only adds to the essential pain of the book. If you want to understand anorexia, read this book.’ ALICE THOMPSON, Scotsman

‘The mind of Hornbacher is sharper than were her collar-bones when she weighed 4 stone, was given a week to live, and suddenly decided not to die. It is her 23-year-old body that was wasted by fourteen years of anorexia and bulimia. Her true story is painfully honest, analytical, complex and sad: compulsive reading.’ Harpers & Queen

‘A brilliantly moving memoir’ TOBIAS JONES, Frank

‘What marks Wasted out is the quality of the voice. Hornbacher is, simply, a good writer. Her gift for description makes even the familiar aspects of the phenomenon newly real. She is coolly vivid on the sheer violence of anorexia, correcting any misconception that it’s a passive disease; it is rather ‘a no-holds-barred attack on your flesh’. There’s an edge to her prose capturing the wildness of her eventual starved mania…successfully catching a young woman’s desperate desire to counter the cultural voice that tells her she’s "too much, too much, too much". Wasted will be of value not only to fellow sufferers: any woman who has ever been made gleeful by the diminishing of her physical self will gain from reading this painful and sharp-boned account.’ SYLVIA BROWNRIGG, Guardian

Customer Reviews

Disturbing, gripping, and absolutely honest
There are so many books out there about eating disorders being 'all about control', or about some teenager who made a miraculous recovery; this squashes those books flat with its honesty and realism. This shows you how it really is, and the language Hornbacher has used to convey the confused, disorientated feeling you get when you're starving and purging yourself to death is spot on. As a sufferer of both anorexia and bulimia, there were some points where I had to put the book down because I felt so faint, because what she was describing felt so true, but this is a book that grips you and demands your attention because once you've started it, you can't think of anything else until you've finished it.

Hornbacher makes no apologies for what she's been through and she doesn't sugar-coat anything. Hers may be a particularly dramatic journey through eating disorders but sufferers will identify with the all-consuming nature of the illness, and those with an interest in the subject can see for themselves just how truly horrifying eating disorders really can be. All is not 'happily ever after' at the end of this book, which keeps in fitting with Hornbacher's honest style. Marya closes the book with the reminder that if you've suffered for a long time, the illness will never really leave you. This may sound depressing but it makes you realise (if you're ill) you never want to be as ill as Marya was, and if you've never suffered, it makes you realise you never want to start down the path of starving, bingeing and purging yourself to death. It's inspiring in its realism, and is the most honest book I've ever read.

So true...
Ive just finished this book and it shocked me how well the Hornbacher decribes eating disorders. I have suffered with a combination of bulimia and to a lesser extent, anorexia for years. There is no other way to say what it does to you except to say that eating disorders are soul destroying. There are days when I want to curl up and die because I know that there is no easy way out but this book shows that however ill you can become, you can also get through. Wasted is a shockingly honest book. Some may say that Hornbacher is almost encouraging readers to toy with the idea of extreme dieting, but I disagree. She is telling the way it really is. Yes, she was an extreme case but it happens and it is terrifying. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the thought process behind bulimia and anorexia. If you have an eating disorder and want a trigger book or some sort of motivation, dont bother. You wont find it here.

Everything an eating disordered person thinks
I read 'Wasted' in one day, once i had picked it up, it was actually impossible for me to leave it. It is one of those books where opening it at any page offers you compulsive reading, and it is true to say that Hornbacher offers a very frank and blunt view of something that, instrinctly, is very complicated. The book did almost inspire me, however, and i do not believe that her desire to help others and stop them from doing what she did, is fulfiled. Having already suffered from bulemia for a year before reading, i found the book full of new ideas, lies and ways of keeping the lifestyle i had, maintained. This is clearly unintentional, but the descriptions of emotion, power, simplicity, ease and almost the glamourisation of the eating disordered existence, would intrigue even those who had never considered it before. I am certainly not advising anyone to miss out on this book, it is an amazing read, words cannot explain how capturing it is until you actually pick it up, but i am advising people to be careful about what they take from it. My congratualtions do go out to Marya Hornbacher for finding exactly the right words for feelings, actions and emotions for things that only people who suffer like her would understand, and so far, i was unable to find. The connection you can make with what she is saying is formidable, amazing, and shocking in some parts because you really believe your the only one fighting and suffering. Marya Hornbacher shows you brutally how wrong you were. An excellent read.